Jelmar has been a growing, evolving company since its inception in 1949. The company began when Manny Gutterman established a national sales representative organization, Manny Gutterman & Associates, Inc. This new company was dedicated to selling all types of proprietary products to chain drug, variety, hardware and department stores and also established an ethical and reliable channel for "close-out" merchandise.

The success that Manny Gutterman & Associates achieved gave Manny the direction and determination to develop and sell his own brand-name products. He created a new company, Jelmar, in the late 1960s when a friend in advertising asked Manny to sell a warehouse full of cleaning product the friend received in barter from a bankrupt client. Manny – along with sons Steven and Arthur – reformulated and repackaged the abandoned product and sold it as Tarn-X® Tarnish Remover. One of the first products that used the phrase “AS SEEN ON TV” in commercials and on packaging, Tarn-X over time has become the number one selling metal cleaner in the United States, as well as a household staple which can be found in every major retailer in the United States.

Jelmar continued to grow over the decades, as family patriarch Manny passed the reins to his sons Arthur and Steven in 1980. During the early 1980s, Manny, Arthur and Steven were meeting with business partner Al Eicoff to develop a product that could serve as a complement to Tarn-X. A powerful lime and rust remover was developed. And after some struggles to find a name for the product, CLR® Calcium, Lime & Rust Remover was born.

The company remains owned and managed by the Gutterman family. After nearly 50 years since inception, Arthur’s daughter Alison became the president of Jelmar in 2007 and the third generation Gutterman to run the company. Much of Jelmar’s recent successes can be attributed to Alison’s commitment to build on Jelmar’s base and to expand research and development of quality cleaning products. Most recently Alison expanded Jelmar’s product offering with the introduction of PRO Line, an industrial line of cleaning products.

Alison has increased Jelmar’s investment in consumer research to gain insights into what consumers are looking for in their cleaning products. Through a partnership with the Environmental Protection Agency in their Safer Choice Program (formerly Design for the Environment (DfE)) as well as other strategic alliances, Jelmar has created innovative, environmentally friendly reformulations of new and existing products that have been well received by consumers, allowing Jelmar to continue to grow now and into the foreseeable future. Additionally, since attaining leadership, Alison has helped Jelmar become certified as woman-owned minority business, helping the company’s continued growth.